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A NEW YEAR ERROR MESSAGE
Astronaut Tim Peake calls wrong number from space station
BBC News
One of the joys of writing a blog like this is that you get a 'dashboard' which shows you how many hits you've had and which countries they've come from. In my case, this is mostly fairly predictable, but two or three weeks ago I had a sudden flurry of hits from Russia, which puzzled me. What was causing them? Was Vladimir perhaps logging on to ease a bit of pressure during the sleepless Kremlin nights? Was Mr Abramovich back home in Chukotka for a few days, grabbing a bit of blessed free time from his travails at Chelsea and wondering if he could perhaps skim off a few million quid from the English comic blog market? (Incidentally, Roman, if you're interested the email address is at the top.) Neither guess, in all honesty, seemed very likely, and then it occurred to me that Russian interest might have been aroused by the last edition of The Autolycan – the one about IKEA and the UFO. You see, the branch of IKEA in question was in fact in Omsk in Siberia – lending weight, incidentally, to the theory that the lads in the UFO were there to stock up on solar panels. Having done their research they would have known that November temperatures in Omsk only rarely get above freezing, and are for the most part well below, and so would reasonably have concluded that the locals would find solar panels handy and that IKEA might be just the place if they wanted rather a lot of them. At any rate, Russian hits there were, and to my new readers across the icy wastes I now send fraternal greetings and wish you С Новым Годом !
Which touches on what today's musings are all about - communication and miscommunication. I only have Google Translate's word for it that I have wished my Russian friends a Happy New Year, and whilst Translate's reputation for accuracy is unrivalled and no doubt jealously guarded, I can't help but harbour a nagging fear that I might have got it wrong. Bad enough if I've gratuitously insulted a bunch of frozen UFO watchers in Omsk; immeasurably worse if my first surmise was correct and I've said something unpardonable to a President who isn't big on making allowances or seeing the funny side. Next thing I know he'll be hammering on my front door, shirtless and with pet polar bear tucked under one arm, wanting to go six televised bare knuckle rounds with me. I would tell him that only one would be necessary - and a short one at that - which would almost certainly be true, but communication being the treacherous fellow that it is he'd be bound to misinterpret, making him angrier than ever. At least I can safely assume that his IT system supports Cyrillic script and that I haven't just called him a bunch of Wingdings, but if yours doesn't – and I have – well, you see the pitfalls of this communication business.
Communication; miscommunication. When I first moved to Hull for a job I worked in an office so antiquated that it still had coal fires in a number of the rooms, which made for an incongruous sight when we first installed computers. The boss, who couldn't have been with the organisation for much more than a century or two, invariably appeared in a pinstriped charcoal grey three piece – whatever the weather – complete with fob watch and chain, except when he made a small concession to supposedly being on leave by turning up in sports jacket and grey flannels. When you were summoned to the presence, he would blink at you owlishly from behind his half moons and over the top of huge piles of overstuffed document wallets which covered most of his desk, leaving him little – or occasionally no – space in which to work. The height of these piles was such that mostly you had to stand to maintain eye contact, which irritated him because you then blocked the heat from the coal fire. You would have expected to see Bob Cratchit round every corner, but for the fact that the office was barely even Dickensian.
Right at the very top of the building was the switchboard, a tiny kingdom – OK, queendom - ruled over absolutely by a dragon called Dolores who must have been in her mid-50s when I, a callow 20-something, first met her. An uninhibited soul, Dolores was the greatest communicator I ever knew, although rarely of those things she was supposed to communicate. Dolores came into her own if you had a titbit of information you wanted to spread without going to all the trouble of spreading it yourself – an engagement, say, a pregnancy or a divorce. An innocent word with Dolores, impressing on her the need for absolute discretion, and you could sit back in the certain knowledge that in something like five nanoseconds flat everyone in each of our nine offices covering some 1350 square miles would know the full story, usually with some heart-rending embellishments of her own. She also enjoyed considerable power – enjoyed it quite a lot in fact – in determining little things like whether to gift you an outside line when your little light blinked on her switchboard, and in her arbitrary approach to deciding which incoming calls she would put through.
Which brings us to poor old Major Tim and his rather well publicised wrong number. I like to think that Tim has got a Dolores of his own somewhere in the unseen upper reaches of his space station, and that while he's struggling to cope with the effects of microgravity and space sickness and the consequences of sixteen sunsets every day (does that mean that the sun is over his yardarm sixteen times a day?) she's up there keeping an intense and critical eye on his every move and throwing random spanners into his hugely complex and expensive works. And it won't stop with making sure he gets the odd embarrassing wrong number or two, not if I know Dolores. Oh, no. Next thing, she'll be telling his Flight Director that Tim's out, and no, she's got no idea when he'll be back, nobody tells her anything, and would he please make sure that his staff have the good grace to tell the operator things like that, if that's not too much to ask? Or she'll decide that while he's out for the Flight Director, he's definitely in for assorted snake oil salesmen who can help him repair a slow running computer they've just spotted, honest, or who want to shift upgrades to phone contracts or cavity wall insulation. Just imagination going to a Cavity Wall Insulators' Trade Fair and basking in the glory of being the one who closed a deal with the space station – 'keep you nice and snug up there, that will sir, I'll get the office to give you a bell to sort out delivery and installation.' I bet she'd put that one through. And listen in. And broadcast news of what they said to Tim and what Tim said to them in a personal best of three nanoseconds.
Communication; miscommunication; ambiguity. I was hoping to include a New Year message from The Autolycan in this edition, but am now terrified of getting a phrase slightly wrong, transforming the intended meaning. Remember when Pat Brown was Governor of California, trying to sound statesmanlike about some local flooding? 'This is the worst disaster in California since I was elected', he solemnly intoned, and no doubt promptly wished he hadn't. It's easily done. The Athens News Courier in Alabama will take a long time to live down the headline Dead Body Found in Cemetery. Carelessness. Mind, sometimes it takes a bit of craft and ingenuity as well. Back in the day we used to compete to produce unimpeachable references for lazy or inept employees we wanted rid of - 'You will be extremely fortunate to get this person to work for you' for the former; 'I can recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever' for the latter. Banana skins loom at every turn.
So, what should I do? If you've read The Autolycan before, you'll know that it often finishes with an anagram. 'All life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie', someone once said, and whilst that may not be entirely true, I reckon it's the safest way to finish today's effort and perhaps get those grey cells going again after the holiday. New Year is of course the season of parties, bonhomie, having a good time. So my new year message to you is :-
Yay! Welcome! Pray have another fun party! (1,4,5,3,4,4,3,9)
Let me know if you work it out!
